In the last decades of the nineteenth century the United States underwent a rapid industrial expansion that moved the nation into the front ranks of the world economy. At the same time, robust democratic institutions formally allocated political power. The primary purpose of this book is to explain how and why economic development and democratic institutions coexisted in the United States. This explanation stresses the intensity of popular claims on wealth, the openness of electoral politics, and the very high saliency of developmental policies underpinning industrial expansion.

The central problem is to explain why, in a democracy, popular claims for a class redistribution of wealth did not divert the stream of investment propelling industrial expansion. Such claims might have been anticipated, particularly from those classes and sectors most injured by industrialization. In fact, however, private capital accumulation in industrial plant and economic infrastructure was almost entirely unrestrained throughout the late nineteenth century. In explaining this result, four features of the national political economy play important roles: the regional nature of industrialization, the varying ways in which claims on wealth were pressed in the different regions, the dynamics and structure of national party competition, and the susceptibility of the different branches of the federal government to popular political influence.